Tag Archives: Wisconsin

Who used to have it in the USA, and who has it now? People with white skin privilege? People who were born male? People with piles of money, much of it stolen from other people’s labor?

I often hear European Americans from all walks of life talking about democracy in the USA – how they want to reclaim it, like in the good old days – and I wonder about how differently from one another we experience this country. This is not our land; not my land nor your land. When European Americans arrived over 500 years ago, we murdered with bullets and small pox blankets – that we intentionally gave to them – the Indigenous people who had lived in balance here for thousands of years. Then we enslaved people of African descent to build the country’s wealth, and kept women – who did not even get the vote until 1920 – second class citizens and the property of men for even longer.

This is a political crime of deception, an enormous bait and switch, in which liberals and quite a few independents were misled by a serial liar who purposely characterized himself as a reformer…

Did you receive your email from Barack Obama yet? If you are a Democrat, or on his campaign mailing list, the president has promised you are going to be the first to know when he formally launches his reelection campaign. It could be any moment now; apparently the White House is waiting for a slow news day when Libya and Fukushima and Congressional budget negotiations aren’t dominating the media agenda. Once the news is out, you are expected as a loyal Obama supporter to start sending in campaign donations and begin attending campaign organization meetings.

The problem is, if you are a liberal, the chances are pretty high that you haven’t forgotten that the White House thinks of you as “fucking retarded”.

Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne charged state Senate Republicans Wednesday with open meetings law violations in connection with a controversial move they made to pass legislation to curtail public sector union bargaining rights.

“Our investigation has found merit in the verified complaints, which allows us to commence this litigation,” says Ozanne in a statement. “This litigation does not address the merits or the wisdom of the legislation.”

Libertarians know and hate the Federal Reserve. They hate Goldman Sachs and J.P Morgan. But they are not willing to go to the poor people who are being forced to pay for the crimes of those people that they hate because it’s a union or because there may be some Democrats involved in it. Libertarians and progressives can find common ground, but at this point still they are refusing to step back and concede a little bit to find it. They have to come together on campaign finance and lobbying and most importantly they can come together on breaking up the banks.

UPDATE: Stranded Wind over at DailyKos has photos of the protest outside M&I, and says the ante has been upped to $600,000! ‘What these pictures show are six hundred ordinary citizens descending on the M&I branch near the Wisconsin Capitol after learning of their purchase of the gubernatorial election last November. Two firefighters with old school ideas about saving had over $600,000 between the two of them and they demanded cashier’s checks on the spot.’ See We’re Going To Destroy A Bank.

Everybody knows the GOP’s biggest weakness is money, so why not hit ’em in the sweet spot? That’s what many amazing Wisconsin firefighters did yesterday when they collectively began withdrawing their funds from Madison’s M&I Bank — whose executives and board members were among the highest donors to Governor Scott Walker’s campaign.

Just as an iceberg’s mass is largely hidden beneath the waters surface, despite state and federal budgetary shortfalls, taxpayer priorities remained primarily concealed…until now. The call for austerity measures and the budgetary turmoil experienced in Wisconsin has taken a state economic union-busting policy and turned it into an explosive national ideological battleground.

Governor Walker managed to destroy a budgetary surplus with the sweep of a pen, by giving tax cuts to corporations and was going to make the public workers pay for it. Simply put, public unions ability to collectively bargain was to blame for the deficit he had created and if the peoples hard won rights could just be revoked, then state government could balance a budget.

Naomi Klein on Anti-Union Bills and Shock Doctrine American-Style: “This is a Frontal Assault on Democracy, It’s a Kind of a Corporate Coup D’Etat”

“Obama is also involved in attacking labor rights with his pushing of charter schools and draconian budget cuts. He’s not a good bad guy for progressives. So, we’re still in a situation where Obama is getting away with, in my opinion, shock doctrine-style tactics, because people don’t—still don’t want to believe that Obama is doing it, too.”

As a wave of anti-union bills are introduced across the country following the wake of Wall Street financial crisis, many analysts are picking up on the theory that award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein first argued in her 2007 bestselling book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In the book, she reveals how those in power use times of crisis to push through undemocratic and extreme free market economic policies. “The Wisconsin protests are an incredible example of how to resist the shock doctrine,” Klein says.

Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you’ll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

The news from Wisconsin today is that Wisconsin State Troopers, under the direction of a political appointee of the Governor, are visiting the homes of legislators who are resisting the Governor’s deeply unpopular legislation. By what reckoning can an executive, using armed men in state uniforms, dictate a legislator’s prerogatives, or the prerogatives of a caucus of legislators? If you chose “brute force,” you answered correctly.Continue reading →

Please see information about purchasing my new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, following this week’s column.

By Robert C. Koehler

On one weekend in February of 2003, an estimated 10 million people in 60 countries took to the streets to protest the looming Iraq war. Never before in history had there been such massive, public opposition to a war before it began. But the war began anyway and the people — their numbers misreported in much of the media by a factor of ten, their opposition seemingly irrelevant — went away.

A decision by U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer, located in the Washington District of Criminals, throwing out a lawsuit brought by Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund (FCLDF) asking the court to halt the implementation of NAIS, was based on her assertion that there is no federal law and/or, no federal regulation ordering the implementation of the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). FCLDF brought the suit asking for temporary injunctive relief Continue reading →